Growing up in the South at a time when there was a lot more etiquette in the air, I learned an important lesson about Easter: That's the day you can begin to wear white shoes again after winter. Fortunately, my family and church taught me more crucial lessons about the holiday that marks the crux of the Christian's life.

The issue of how you shepherd your children in a hyper-sexualized culture is what keeps me up at night, quite literally. I have three kids: a nine year-old boy, a four year-old boy and a six year-old daughter. I walk into their rooms and pray for them almost every night before I go to bed. As far as ministering to our children is concerned, there are a few things my wife and I do. And I don’t think I have all this figured out, so ask me again in ten to fifteen years and maybe I’ll have something more to say. But, here are the main things we are doing:

My children are adults now and several have children of their own. We had lots of fun as a family, and I have lots of great memories of raising our kids. But in retrospect, I think I would have done a number of things differently. So I share them in hopes that younger parents might benefit and not make some of the mistakes I did. Some things I would do differently:

In a recent study, Barna Group asked adults how much a variety of factors influences their personal identity. While it may not come as a surprise that “family” ranks first, it is perhaps unexpected how much more likely certain groups (Elders, practicing Christians, residents of the Midwest) are to say so and how much less likely other groups (Millennials, people with no faith, residents of the West) are to point to family as a key part of their identity.

We’ve deferred having children for so long — college-educated woman today have their first child at 30.3 years old — and we have so many fewer children than we once did (an average of two per family, as opposed to five in 1850) that we assign them a far higher value and therefore fret far more about their physical well-being.

There aren’t many instructions in the Bible written specifically to Christian dads, but Paul speaks directly to us in his letter to the Ephesians: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). If you were to log your time, what would your schedule say about your attention to this verse?

Even at the best of times there is nothing simple about raising children. But throw in a million new technologies—new devices and social networks and apps—and things get far more complicated still. This is every parent’s challenge today.

The concept of daycare as a benefit to children rather than a negative hasn’t gone away, and conversations linger around the edges of this window into childhood. For example, President Obama’s state of the union speech this year was criticized for incentivizing working moms with the promise of universal daycare, leading some to wonder if he was implying that stay-at-home mothers are less than ideal.

Even the goodness of boyhood energy is broken by the fall. But in most cases, what if we are getting the diagnosis wrong? What if ADHD seems more like God-given characteristics of what it means to actually be a boy?

Both high expectations and low expectations have the potential to harm our kids, so what is a parent, or a teacher, a coach, a pastor, to do? We strive to be sensitive to avoid provoking anxiety and too much pressure, but not so soft that we lead kids to apathy and stagnancy.